Hierarchy traversal (e.g., tree data structure traversal) is an important building block for applications working on large data sets. As an example, accelerated ray tracing relies on traversing tree data structures in an order given by heuristics in order to efficiently find intersections of rays and scene geometry. One important component of hierarchy traversal is the ability to backtrack within a tree data structure. However, current methods for performing backtracking within a tree data structure have one or more of performance issues and storage size issues.
Thus, there is a need for addressing these issues and/or other issues associated with the prior art.